General: A Bad Week for ISPs

I've been without the internet since Friday now after it suddenly disconnected me. Yesterday, an engineer discovered it was the board we were connected to at the exchange was fried. Over 24 hours later and it's still not been replaced. I guess I should consider setting up the mobile internet via my mobile phone. At the same time, I have Bulldog Broadband trying to take me to court for over £400, for bills and accounts that aren't even mine. Frustrating to say the least, especially as I'm having to spend so much time defending myself for something I haven't done. Sigh.

I'm sitting here in the Tonbridge library, where I can get free internet access for up to an hour. However, the machines are so slow that 6 minutes of that hour is used logging on and firing up Internet Explorer 6.0. Today I hit the jackpot and found a 3Ghz P4 machine, which seems to run a little better, but still amazingly slow. I wonder how much quicker it would be if they had a Linux/Firefox/OpenOffice install here instead.

Although they have tried to lock most things down, I was surprised to see that the old Windows Key + Pause still works, and I was open to fiddle with quite a few things. I resisted the temptation, but I did download Portable FireFox as I remembered that this site still has rendering issues in IE 6.

It's funny, it's only until the internet goes down that you realise how dependent you are on it. Google has become an extension of my brain (my friends joke that I Google everything), and reminds me somewhat of a Stargate episode where everyone has a brain link to a central computer, which eventually takes control a little and changing their memories.

I went to look through my To Do list and Calendar, and remembered that they are all on Google Apps (still not synchronising to my phone..). I then figured I'd do some non-work things. Pretty much all of them involved using the internet in some way - even for looking up specs, or pin outs, or getting in touch with people that I realised I only have on MSN.

What's worse, I'm missing out on quality XKCD!